There is nothing like watching a live genocide on TV
To make you feel groggy,
sick to the stomach. You can’t enjoy your favorite meal
On that blurry Saturday afternoon. Instead, the dishes keep piling
in the sink, the food keeps rotting
and you keep falling in and out of sleep,
dreaming of green swathes, tormenting meadows,
Olive trees.
“They’re massacring the whole strip.”
You watch brooding Arab films
you weep at Waltz With Bashir
Then you feel stupid at somehow
missing all the lynchings, killings in
your own country.
Remember when they cut down
and burnt an aging man in a flaming society,
just miles from where you lived?
You dreamed of being in that very society
on that very night—how could you miss it?
Remember when you joined that protest,
and missed being thrashed by the police
because you had left because you began menstruating?
Instead, you sit on your beige sofa and watch
monochrome art films about genocides.
You read graphic novels about Palestine.
You writhe in pain and plead.
You dream about pickled human flesh
You continue feeling useless.
You can remember a time
when someone paraded your own pain
for their own benefit.
For a celebrated exhibition, for a book reading,
For social media likings.
Meanwhile, people are still being cut
In Manipur, Syria, Falastin
And you can do nothing Except
be affected by these atrocities.
Your friends get annoyed,
Why do you do this to yourself?
Your self-induced depression is
not going to undo the mass murdering.
All you do is spread this second-hand trauma
like a Disease.
Perhaps. But also, you want to inflict this on yourself
as a matter of principle. People don’t stop being killed
because you chose not to see.
And perhaps if everyone looked
(really looked) at everything,
Children wouldn’t be unfolded every day like
wounded flowers; nameless mothers in headscarves
wouldn’t balk at blurry cameras and weep.
Madras Courier originally ran as a broadsheet with a poetry section. It was a time when readers felt comfortable sharing glimpses of their lives through verse. If you have a poem you’d like to submit, do email us at editor@madrascourier.com.
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